You can monitor the Spotfire Server to detect problems with the server itself, with external systems, or with the network. You can also detect misconfigured clients or (in some cases) malicious behavior.

Spotfire Server runs within the Tomcat application server. Tomcat provides the basic functionality needed, the server (Agent level), and a Java Remote Method Invocation (Java RMI) connector (Remote Management level).

Tomcat provides a rich instrumentation set for monitoring and managing the application server. For example, it monitors Tomcat configuration parameters and basic usage statistics. The Java runtime environment that ships with Spotfire Server is also heavily instrumented using JMX. This toolset provides information about CPU and memory usage, garbage collection, and thread pools. In addition, JMX is the only way to capture logs for the data function services.

For other monitoring tasks, see the following.

• To monitor the server itself, view and manage logs, and troubleshoot the server, log in to the Spotfire Server administration interface and see the Overview page of Monitoring and Diagnostics.
• To monitor user actions and system events, such as those from Spotfire, Spotfire Web Player, and Spotfire Automation Services, see Action logs and system monitoring.
• To monitor other aspects of the server, use available tools such as TIBCO Hawk®, JConsole (which is included in the installed Java Development Kit), or any other Java Management Extensions (JMX)-compliant monitoring tool.

This section provides information on the architecture of the JMX system, types of information captured by JMX, and how to configure and work with JMX-compliant tools to monitor Spotfire Server.